Thursday, December 17, 2009

Progressives who have turned against the individual mandate in health care reform may want to highlight their one-time ally in that fight: President Barack Obama. Throughout the 2008 primary campaign, the mandate was one of the bigger debates between Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama won the election but Clinton arguably won that debate, since the President took up the mandate in his health care plan. But he was pretty adamant about why he didn’t think a mandate was useful in the past. Perhaps the best distillation of that comes in this interview to CNN from Febuary 2008: